


strange creatures

by Utopiste



Series: l'étrange [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes of Grindelwald, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Leta Lestrange deserved better, just hurt no comfort, oh no i made myself sad, please let's make this a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 20:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16709938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utopiste/pseuds/Utopiste
Summary: Leta is fifteen and dramatic and thinks she is so in love with her best friend she could die. Leta Lestrange is nineteen and tries too had to make this other boy smile, feeling like a teenager with a crush on her friend’s older brother all over again. Leta is thirty and finds out the people you stumble upon in the most unfortunate circumstances can be among the best ones you ever met.Four times Leta Lestrange loved someone (and more than one time they loved her back).





	strange creatures

**Author's Note:**

> Still feeling very eeeh about this movie in general, but one thing it did was make me fall completely in love with Leta Lestrange and Zoe Kravitz's portrayal of her so yeah
> 
> #Letalestrangedeservedbetter let's get this tag trending
> 
> This is unbetaed so tell me if anything is wrong! Also there might be inaccuracies in this, but so be it cause I absolutely refuse to walk back into theaters to watch her die again

**φιλία**

When Leta walks along Hogwarts’ hallways, she hears the whispers - they call her  _ pure-blooded freak  _ and _ inbred weirdo _ and other names that are so much worse. She has been taught not to repeat these sort of words by the mean old house-elf at home who would wash her tongue with cleaning potions when she swore. 

These kids are wicked mean to her, but she is meaner and a thousand times more wicked, so some of them stop talking about her in the corridors and start looking over their shoulders. There are idiots of course, who keep up the whispers and the cruel jokes, but what would life be without a few occasions to try out new curses from times to times?

She still avoids people as a general rule and that, ironically, is how she finds Newt one day. 

She found the room all on her own, ran around a corner and climbed up a scale and ended up here - in this tiny place filled with open, dog-eared books, a Puffskein whose fur was shaved off in a shoe box with aeration holes and tadpoles in a chipped glass jug. She snoops around for a while - she isn’t a Slytherin for no reason after all - but she gets caught up in the cuteness of the Puffskein and winds up sitting on the floor playing with the little guy for what feels like seconds but is probably more like hours. This is when the boy comes in.

Both of them freeze. Leta is still crouching awkwardly next to the Puffskein, he is not done climbing up yet, and they make a pretty ridiculous picture. 

He must be her age but looks smaller somehow, and infinitely more gentle, with soft curls falling on his forehead and wide, surprised eyes. She sneers at him and he almost trips over his own feet. It is very satisfying.

“Who are you?” she says at the same time he asks: “What are you doing here?” and then they try to answer each other’s question in rambling, simultaneous sentences until they shut up.

He finally climbs into the room, and the Puffskein runs to him in a way that is almost insulting to Leta. Even more so is the boy’s complete dismissal of her, bending down towards the little animal and talking to it in a soft voice. “What’s up, Eridanus? Are you feeling better, little guy? Was the scary girl nice to you?”

She frowns at being called a scary girl, then decides she likes it. Being scary is better than being a freak. 

“Eridanus is a stupid name for a Puffskein,” she comments. 

The boy stops cooing, and sort of raises his head, but he still won’t look her in the eyes. “I didn’t  _ name _ him,” he says. “He’s not mine.”

“Whose is he then?”

“A first year Slytherin, Arcturus Black. He’s a bit… Intense.”

Leta snorts. “His head is so big I’m surprised he can still get through the Great Hall door.”

The boy frowns, confused. “Why can’t he go through the door? What happened to his head?”

“...Because he’s big-headed? It’s a phrase? It’s just… something people say,” Leta says after an awkward pause. 

The boy lets out an  _ oooh _ and they are silent again. She remembers him now: they are in the same Charms and Herbology classes, and he never speaks up even though the Charms teacher is Head of his house. She picks at her nails, he gets up and fiddles with Eridanus’ box, sneaking nervous glances at her when he thinks she won’t notice. (She does. He is not exactly subtle.)

“Why is his fur all shaved off?” she asks. 

“Arcturus got some sort of pink goo all over it,” he says, looking pained. “So he brought him to me, because I’m, um, I’m sort of good with animals, and I told him the only thing I could do was, well, to shave all of his fur off, so I did, but he said he looked ugly now and he didn’t want him anymore. So he’s staying in here until I find him a new home.”

She looks at him intently while he avoids her gaze. “I think it’s the most I’ve ever heard you speak. In fact, I think I’ve never heard you speak.”

“I’m kind of, I’m not very, good, with people.”

Leta waits a little while he bounces nervously under her stare before she smiles at him. “It’s  alright. Most people aren’t worth the effort anyway.”

It takes a second too long, but he smiles back at her, timidly, and it feels important somehow in her thirteen year-old mind. He is surprisingly bearable, and she is emotionally invested in Eridanus now, so she shows up the next day, and the day after that, until she becomes part of the decor and Eridanus finds a new home and she doesn’t want to leave anymore because she found one too.

 

_ Philia  (Ancient Greek  φιλία) , often understood as brotherly love, can refer to friendship or affection. The complete opposite of philia is called phobia - fear. _

 

They are in the Forbidden Forest, fifteen year-old, and Newt is making a fool of himself over yet another animal - so far, nothing unusual.

“A tad more to the right,” Leta says, leaning back on her elbows from where she is sat. It is this really big, weirdly shaped rock that she claimed as her throne immediately and fought a very reluctant Newt over (she is pretty sure he just went along with it to please her whims, but she is alright with it). 

She kicks her feet around. “Nope, just a little to the left -  _ there _ .”

His freckled hands tremble as he runs his finger against the Thestral’s leathery, skinny wing. Of course, he cannot see it - there are only a few kids in their year that can, including Leta, for reasons she chose not to disclose. As always, Newt respected her wishes.

The Thestral lowers its head slightly, sniffing his hair a little, and for a second she is scared it will open its mouth and reveal its sharp fangs and chow down on his head altogether, but instead, it  _ licks _ him. A long, slimy stripe along the entire left side of his face that makes his hair stick up. He whips around to beam at her and her heart skips a beat. She wills it to  _ shut up _ .

“I felt her! I did!” he says and bounces a little before adding, “Leta, she licked me!”

She snorts: only Newt could be instantly popular with carnivorous, fanged, skeleton horses that look like they come from the depths of Hell itself. “Yes, I noticed.”

He smiles at her some more, bright and overwhelming, before he gets back to the beast. A few days ago he told her he wished he could see them, and she looked at him hard and cold before she says,  _ no you don’t _ . She almost felt guilty with how sad and wide his eyes grew. She knows she is unfair to him sometimes - that the only reason he puts up with her is because she is his only option, because people don’t get it yet, the genius and the warmth behind his awkward shuffles and avoidant stares. (They will one day. She is sure of it.)

She tries to make her peace with it. She takes everything he has to offer her, greedy and desperate, and never gives back nearly enough, and waits for the day he realizes she is just not worth the trouble.

But today he shuffles towards her to tug at her hand and bring her to the animals so she can take care of them with him, give them meat and affection they sorely need. Her hand is warm and tingly in his. 

Sometimes he is so  _ bright _ , and she feels like the moon must do, striving to stay in his orbit to reflect some of his light and none of his warmth. 

Leta is fifteen and dramatic and thinks she is so in love with her best friend she could die. He is still just  _ Newt _ . Same gangly frame and messy hair. Yet now she notices how appealing his breakable body is, the copper shine in his hair, all of this silliness that makes her feel like all the others stupid schoolgirls with a crush. But anyway, Newt is Newt and would probably notice a salamander more than he would notice a girl, so here’s that.

“You really like them, don’t you?” she asks him. “You know how ugly they are, right?”

“Don’t say that,” he says and frowns. “They’re not  _ ugly _ . They’re just- people don’t understand them yet. But they will.”

“No, they won’t,” she says. He doesn’t try to contradict her further - she wishes he would. She won’t say it out loud.

Instead what she does say is, “Did you do the Charms homework yet? I forgot mine again.”

Two years later Newt gets expelled taking the blame for a mistake she did and they stop talking. Maybe it is because of her guilt or maybe it is because of his regret, or maybe both. 

On her last year she is so alone she lets the other Slytherin girls teach her how to put makeup on and tame her curly hair. Most of all she learns how to pretend to be domesticated but still feels like the wild wicked girl she always was, casting hexes in the dark. 

 

**ἔρως**

She doesn’t mean to fall in love with Theseus - it just happens one day. She is sixteen and bunking with Newt for Christmas holidays, because her father hates her and her mother-in-law carries her sadness around with her at all times and there is no place for both of their griefs in only one house. The Scamander household is weird and flawed - Mrs Scamander purses her lips in silent reprobation when Newt talks about the animals, and Mr Scamander keeps telling him to look in people’s eyes when he talks to them even though Newt obviously can’t. They still love each other a lot though, even when they don’t understand. 

Theseus is eight years older, charming and smooth over the edges in all the ways Newt is not. This is not what makes her fall in love with him. He is also way more similar to his brother than he thinks - this is not what makes her fall in love with him either.

He shows up for dinner in a whirlwind of elegantly tailored robes and curled hair that is neatly divided in its midst, looking like a gentleman, looking straight out of a novel. But Leta doesn’t like him for that, not immediately, not when Mr and Mrs Scamander gaze at him like he is the prodigal son returned and at Newt like someone they are supposed to love. She stays away, wary and fascinated, all the more annoyed as he smiles at her and ruffles Newt’s hair while his brother ducks and pouts his way away from him.

When Newt and her are in the kitchen helping to prepare dinner while Mr Scamander and Theseus are in the living room talking “between men” (something that doesn’t seem to affect Newt in any way, which she does not understand but does not question either), she asks him about it.

“You never talked about your brother,” she says. “We’ve been friends for years now.”

Newt stares at the plates he is floating out the cupboard with more intent than necessary. “It never came up,” he says. “We don’t have a lot in common, my brother and I. We don’t even really talk, all that much.”

She doesn’t understand how it feels, to love someone but not know how, so she doesn’t try to press it out of him. That evening at dinner, Theseus is charming when he asks her questions about her life, Hogwarts, how Newt is doing in school, their other friends (or lack thereof).

By the end of dinner, she finds herself staying a little longer to finish their argument on the current flaws in the way Defense Against the Dark Arts is taught. He is in favor of more practical application and she thinks the entire course subject is pointless. Both of them are passionate and enthusiastic about the issue, and they keep talking over each other and mocking each other’s point cruelly, and it is  _ exhilarating _ .

“Well, good to know you think my Auror training is for naught,” he says good-naturedly. “I will make sure to remember that if there is ever a raid in the Lestrange’s mansion. Or Gringotts vault.”

“You are completely misquoting what I said. I’m just saying, if they make it Defense against the  _ Dark _ Arts, we should at least study how Dark Arts are accomplished,” she says. “How do you want to fight something you do not understand? It is just - like Muggles says, you have to see how the sausage is made.”

Even as she says it, she can feel how incongruous it is coming out of her mouth. Theseus chuckles softly, and he has a crooked smile on his face, sly in all the ways his brother’s is disarming, and she is blinded for a second. 

She spends the rest of their conversation striving to please him and get him to smile this way again, to get his approval, because when a person like Theseus approves of you, you feel like maybe you are even the smallest bit as good, clever,  _ interesting _ as he is. In the rest of their lives together, this is the constant - how, when Theseus looks at her with appreciation and joy, she feels a little less like Leta Lestrange. (She will regret, much later, never getting the chance to be Leta Scamander.)

When she gets back to the room she shares with Newt, she is grinning until she realizes he is sitting on his mattress, already changed and reading. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, but he is all too ready to shrug it off and pretend he doesn’t mind, so she adds before he can: “I was just telling your brother Aurors will have a lot to learn from you once you write them a book about how  _ not _ to kill every vaguely threatening magical creature they encounter.”

He smiles a little at that - she is aware that mentioning animals is an easy way out, that she is making too many excuses for how bad a friend she is - and says, “Don’t worry. I know how Theseus is.”

_ Charming _ and  _ easygoing _ and  _ likeable _ are all words he doesn’t say. She hears them anyway. 

“I don’t know, I just don’t see why your parents wax so much poetry about him,” she says, and she is lying, a petty little lie. “He is clever, charming, sure, but you’re wicked brilliant. A much better experimenting partner, really.”

He protests, argues about his brother’s smarts and his kindness, because he is Newt, all that is righteous and soft, and she knows deep down that this petty lie was all for herself. In spite of it, when Theseus comes back a few more times during the holidays, she still gets caught up in  _ him _ every time. 

Then the school year begins and she forgets about him again, sort of.

 

_ Eros (Ancient Greek ἔρως)is a passionate or romantic love, the kind that is regularly depicted in movies. _

 

When Newt leaves Hogwarts and her, she is all alone again - except she is always surrounded, now, what with finally fulfilling her destiny as a well-bred pureblood young lady. It doesn’t help, somehow. She resigns herself to it all, calls it growing up. Of course, deep down, to her school, she is still crazy girl Leta Lestrange, and she knows the other Slytherins only act friendly because their parents told them to, but she lets everyone else believe she softened around the edges until she can graduate and disappear entirely. 

There are still a few curses here and there, though - she isn’t about to break her own traditions, after all. 

When she sees Theseus again, it is two years since she graduated and three since she last talked to Newt. Their correspondence is sporadic at best. This doesn’t come from Newt’s end, who is dedicated and constant even in hastily written letters on odd papers, pages from notebooks he scribbled around because there is something he wants her to read or newspapers clippings almost unreadable or, occasionally, parchments. No, their growing distance is all because of Leta, who reads his letters avidly again and again, but never seems to find anything to write back that isn’t trite or desperate. She was always more of a reader than a writer. 

Between her fading friendship with Newt and her own tendency to isolate herself, she hasn’t had a chance to see Theseus in a very long time. She almost doesn’t recognize his neat curled hair and crooked smile when she first catches a glance of them in Flourish & Blotts.

“Hi, stranger,” she hears, and even then it takes her a second to recognize the voice.

“Oh, hello,” she says.

“Wait, does Lestrange come from stranger? Or strange?” he says, leaning against the bookcase. 

“It’s from archaic French, actually.  _ Lestrange _ ,  _ l’estrange _ ,  _ étrange _ , strange.  _ L’étranger _ , the stranger. So, in a way, both. It is not like we can trace it back to something this specific - though not for lack of trying,” she says, automatically, because she still has a book half open in hand and her mind is not back to reality just yet. He smiles. 

Leta Lestrange doesn’t care about people as a general rule, but suddenly, she really wants to make him smile again. And she does when she advises him on books to offer Newt as a Christmas present, then once again when she accepts his offer to get coffee once she is done shopping, then all throughout the afternoon, hands around a cup of hot chocolate, watching him watch her with warm eyes, feeling like a fifteen year-old student with a crush on her friend’s older brother once again. 

Inside of her, he brings up nostalgia and thrill all at once and when she kisses him a month later, he smiles against her lips so much it keeps interrupting them. She digs her fingers into his hair and messes it up just because she can. She tugs at it that same night when they stumble into his apartment. 

They move in together only nine months later against all of his friends’ advice, because living together doesn’t change her life that much when he is already running in her head all day. When she looks at him with sleepy eyes reading his morning paper and reaching awkwardly for his cup of coffee, something warm blooms in her chest. It might not have been what she imagined for herself at sixteen, yearning for his brother and to run away, but she is at home here. 

 

**στοργή**

Leta walks slowly around the place - the charms Newt put on his suitcase really are amazing, and they make her both proud and melancholic, yearning for a timid teenage boy who doesn’t exist anymore - as they hear mayhem breaking out from above their heads. He is probably wrecking the entire Ministry while they are stuck in here. Of course, the both of them, Tina and Leta, could have thought of a more  _ elegant _ solution than unleashing a Zouwu if they put their minds to it for long enough, but well, this works too.

There is a herd of little Nifflers running around that she crouches next to, a soft smile on her face as she runs her fingers along their fur - she would be lying if she denied that she missed this a little.

On the other side of the room, Tina is still standing uncomfortably, shifting her weight from foot to foot, trying to lean on the desk behind her.

“So,” Tina says and fidgets with one of Newt’s tools. Leta smiles to herself and refrains from warning her she might cut herself. “This is a bit… Awkward.”

She tries not to look too amused as she asks, “Oh, really? Why do you think so?”

“Well,” Tina starts and stops, obviously not knowing what to say.

Leta decides to let her have some relief from her stare and looks away. They never met but Tina feels familiar : she is much alike Newt in some ways. She is determined, even if she is ruthless in a way he ever could, and gentle too. But most of all she has this same sort of restlessness to her, which might be because they are in imminent danger or just because Leta unsettles her.

“How do you think he is doing up here?” Leta says just as they hear a loud thudding noise. She glances at Tina, who is relieved by the change of subject. Leta notices that for someone whose job involves a lot undercover work, she certainly carries her thoughts on her face too much. 

“Oh, well, it sounds like this is going about as great as expected,” Tina says, with a little chuckle, “I mean, it is  _ Newt’s _ plan.” 

Leta snorts. “That  _ is _ right. Who even let him in here in the first place?”

“I believe I am guilty for this, but for what it’s worth, I’m starting to really regret it.”

She laughs out loud at that. “How did you even get in here anyway?”

And so Tina tells her about finding each other in a man’s homemade jail cell, about flasks of Polyjuice hidden in jackets and then fading at an inappropriate time, about lying to gullible little old ladies who turned out not to be so harmless after all. It is a good story, fun enough to sort of forget the telltale noises of disaster above them and forget that Tina carved a place for herself where Leta used to be. 

Meeting each other might be an accident resulting of the most unfortunate situations, but Leta is glad they did so anyway. She tells Tina as much. The surprised, pleased look on her face makes Leta feel content. For once she doesn’t regret speaking up.

Then of course the door in the ceiling opens, and they barge out to witness even more unfortunate situations, and Merlin, they never stop running, apparently.

 

_ Storge (Ancient Greek στοργή), as an empathy bond, is liking someone through the fondness of familiarity, amongst people who have found themselves bonded by chance. _

 

They don’t get much of a chance to talk after that, what with all the craziness, but Leta doesn’t forget the look on Tina’s face as she makes her tale. She doesn’t dare watch her newfound brother, with his resolve of steel hardening his traits, or the boy who is definitely not her blood, whose hope is all he has left and he still has to love anyway, or even Newt, who is quietly heartbroken, impossible to look at. So she focuses on Tina as she speak, Tina with her wide, ever so worried eyes, who doesn’t seem sad or shocked, just drinks her words with a reassuring smile that is barely there, and understands. 

When they are done, they stumble onto the rally, and Leta is desperate to find her fiancé. It feels like years since she last talked to him. She decides she will look for Tina to thank her when it is all over, then maybe invite her over for a cup of tea when she gets back to London.

 

**ἀγάπη**

She never gets a chance to. Grindelwald talks rounds around them, then the Aurors arrive, as stoic as they can be, and then a man falls, a man she worked with for months now, a  _ good _ man, and then… Then there is blue everywhere, flames lapping at bones, dancing on burnt flesh, withering up on the ashes. The smell is overwhelming - it smells like fireplaces and bacon and something ominous and terrible Leta could never describe and makes it all terrifying - and it is the worst thing, worst than seeing these men she has been working with for a year now falling down screaming and never getting up again. 

She walks toward him and looks back at them, the faces of the two men she loved, the only men she loved, and she always knew she would lose the both of them. She is just grateful for the little time they gave her when she pulls out her wand and sacrifices her monster life for their human hearts. 

_ I love you _ , she says, because this is the first time she will ever tell Newt and the last time she will ever tell Theseus. She turns around and never looks back and when she finally lets go, there are claw marks all over the people she chose to give herself to.

_ Agape (Ancient Greek ἀγάπη)is the highest form of love, selflessness - a universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. _

She dies for love and it is like being born again. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> kudos feed my hungry goblin soul, and if you are also pissed about Leta's unfair treatment come yell with me in the comment section


End file.
